News : March 2000

I have always wondered what the 'right' way is to present a Flash site. I don't think there is really a 'right' or 'wrong' way to design a Flash site, but the O'Neill site has come closer to perfection than any other corporate Flash site I have ever seen.

Ryan Holsten has amazed us once again. Not only is there a new look and feel for Invertebrae, but a new concept. The group refers to it as 'Educate through design' and I think the idea is simply brilliant. You must see this!

Glenn Davis and Teresa Martin's ProjectCool joined the DevX family of sites. Will this be the end of ProjectCool as we know it or the start of something great? We don't know... but we know Glenn will never vanish from the web.

Piping hot fresh... right out of the oven... the new issue of A List Apart is out with a very timely article about Microsoft's IE5 for the MacOS. Folks, this is the beginning of something great... full standard compliance... it's already bringing tears to designers everywhere... no more blood will be spilled, no more clients lost. Standards are on their way to becoming fully supported.

Did your submit your site to the 5k award yet? The deadline is almost here... you got till April 2nd... no later. I can't wait to see the entries... imagine what some of the brilliant web designers can do with a bare 5k of data!

It is very rare that I come to a site that I feel is so well designed that I am able to remember it several months later without a bookmark. Martin Kulakowski has done that. His unique use of color, eye for style, and attention to detail shine way above the status quo. Best of all, he's looking for a design job... Razorfish, USWeb/CKS and Sapient, lookout!

The Academy Awards are over and the winners have been announced. Everything I learned in film school made me trust my instincts and those who won were no surprise for me. The Matrix brought home buckets of Oscars for the FX end of things and American Beauty pulled in several Oscars including Best Picture. What did surprise me was the Dot-Coms and technology push of this year's show. How many Dot-Coms can you put into a four-hour show? The Academy may be the only people who can answer that. In a few years from now the Academy Awards will probably look more like a multimedia fair than a traditional film award show. With the advent of things that companies like Intertainer call 'Convergence', the film and video industry will be reinvented, but what does that mean to the web? I invite you to contribute your ideas.

Who said we never loved you? From the dungeons of World Wide Web Artists' Consortium comes news of the release of IE5.0 for MacOS before Microsoft has even posted it on their website. Download it now before the crowd comes in and starts flooding the servers.

Ahh, all the work late last night has paid off for me. Hot off the press, a new issue of A List Apart is available for your reading pleasure. Check out the latest noise about Gecko, IE5 and Opera4 in Zeldman's article, "Why Gecko Matters"

Mirror, mirror... imagine that looking into a mirror was a look inside of someone's life.. imagine that someone on the other side of that wall was looking into your life... behold, Jezebel's Mirror. Matt informs me that my reflection has been added to the mirror gallery.

Joshua Maruto (AKA NoFriendo) tells us he is getting ready for the FlashForward2000 Conference in San Francisco. Two of his sites (praystation.com and once-upon-a-forest.com) were nominated for three awards at the Flash Film Festival. So let's give him the respect he deserves and vote for his sites.

Aleksi Kemppainen of Pehmuste fame tells us we have linkage. If you missed the post from Sunday, this site is truly kick ass. One of the first dHTML sites that I have seen that didn't crash Navigator 4.08 (the crash prone monster that it is). Pehmuste updates frequently so keep going back for more fresh and funky design, they do some good work.

From somewhere deep in Sweden, Jeffrey Zeldman emails us to let us know he's still alive and he hasn't ran away to hide in some distant country under a fake name. Sounds like we may see a new issue of A List Apart soon but we are not sure if that's just the jetlag talking. Tomorrow he leaves for Dallas, Texas. Jeffrey, it's 5am, get some sleep man!

In light of my birthday, I have decided to give a little back to the web community... ok, so it's more of a ego boost, but still... I have completed work on my own personal portfolio site. Check it out.

I totally agree with what Token has to say. The 2000 Webby Awards are a total joke. Most of the sites that were nominated have been around for years... do they know there is newer stuff out there? And talk about Form Follows Function... some of these sites have NO Form at all. Two thumbs down.

One day away till d-day... or b-day, however you want to word it. So what's the biggest event? Well, for me it's my birthday... but for you (and somewhat more entertaining) it's the announcement of the nominees for the 2000 Webby Awards. Digital Web Magazine could get nominated, of course pigs can fly, right?

While we are in the process of wrapping up the next issue of Digital Web Magazine, check out the March/April issue of Artistica if you haven't already. Artistica is a very cool mag created by the very talented Crch and Sean.

Some kick ass dHTML going on over at Pehmuste, now in it's 4th release. Finally, someone did dHTML the *right* way. They recommend Netscape Communicator 4.7+ and/or Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 but it worked fine on my [CSS/dHTML crash-prone] Netscape Navigator 4.08 out of all browsers!

Somewhere in a distant land, far away from the dungeon that is Digital Web Magazine,
Zeldman, Peyo, Mschmidt and TokeN are kicking it at Information Highway's Design Days. You probably won't see a new issue of ALA this Friday, but check those sites for updates from Stockholm, Sweden.

They say competition is good for the consumer and that is exactly what Adobe is promoting. Today, Adobe unveiled it's LiveMotion 1.0, a vector-based tool for creating web graphics that can include sound and motion. It's designed to compete directly with Flash, of course.

In a word: Brilliance. Marc Klein has done it again and it's even better than before. That's right, pixel:industries has been redesigned. If there was ever a web site that you simply must see or die trying to see it is this site.

For those of you who have been out of the loop, Digitalthread, perhaps the world's only 'real' design portal, is currently undergoing the development of it's 2nd generation site. If it's anything like the existing 1st generation, it's going to kick serious ass. We can't wait to see what Filip Stoj and Hugo Manassei have been cooking up.

The Mozilla team tells us that Milestone 14 (otherwise known M14) is now available for download at mozilla.org. This is the browser engine that will eventually become Netscape Navigator 6.0, but it is still very alpha. Additional information and news can be found at mozillazine.org

Today was a sad day, I found out that Rich Cooluris had ended MixedMedia... cut off at the knees... more blood all over the walls... you can still almost hear the screams and crying... Another independant content producer down... oh, the humanity. Uploading's Public Humiliation has been permanently canceled... canceling a notice about canceling a site, what's next? It feels so dark out there... so empty... am I alone now?